The definitions, briefly
Four terms are used almost interchangeably, and the differences are small enough that arguing about them is a waste of a meeting.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| SEO | Search engine optimisation. Getting a page to rank in a list of results. |
| GEO | Generative engine optimisation. Getting a business or page cited inside a generated answer. |
| AEO | Answer engine optimisation. Effectively the same thing; the older term, from the featured-snippet era. |
| AI SEO | Used two ways, confusingly: optimising for AI search, or using AI tools to do SEO. Ask which one somebody means before agreeing to buy it. |
For practical purposes, GEO and AEO are the same discipline and both are a specialisation of SEO rather than a replacement for it. Anybody selling GEO as a separate product with a separate retainer is charging twice for one set of foundations.
What is exactly the same
Start here, because it is most of it, and it is the part that stops GEO being a reason to abandon what you were doing.
- The page has to be crawlable, fast and rendered. An assistant cannot cite a page it could not fetch. Everything technical you were already doing still applies.
- The content still has to be genuinely good and genuinely about something. There is no formatting trick that makes a thin page citable.
- Authority still counts. Systems that cite sources prefer sources other people already trust, for the same reason people do.
- Structured data still helps machines read the page correctly. It matters slightly more here, not less.
- Local signals still decide local answers. Ask an assistant for a web designer in Manchester and the businesses it names are overwhelmingly the ones with a strong, consistent local presence.
If your SEO foundations are weak, GEO is not a shortcut past them. It is the same road with a different destination at the end.
What is genuinely different
Five things, and they are real differences rather than repackaging.
One: the unit of value is the sentence, not the page
In classic search you optimise a page to rank. In generated answers, a system lifts a claim. That changes how you write: every important statement should survive being removed from its surroundings. "It depends on your requirements" is useless out of context. "A small business website in the UK costs £500 to £5,000 to build in 2026" is a sentence that can be picked up and carried.
Two: sourced facts are safer to quote, so they get quoted
A model repeating an unsourced number is taking a risk. A model repeating "94.5% of 17,233 items, from a Merchant Centre sync log read in September 2026" is repeating something that carries its own defence. Attaching the source and the date to the figure, in the same sentence, is the single highest-value habit in this whole discipline.
Three: consistency across the web matters more than on the page
Classic SEO is largely about your site. Generative systems assemble an understanding of an entity from everywhere it appears. If your website says one thing, your Google Business Profile says another and a directory listing from 2021 says a third, you are not a confusing business — you are a business the system has low confidence about, and low confidence means not mentioned.
Four: there is no position one
You are either in the answer or you are not, and there is no equivalent of "we moved from 8 to 6". This makes progress lumpy and makes reporting harder, which is why so much AI-visibility reporting is a vanity score with a percentage on it.
Five: first-hand material is disproportionately valuable
These systems have already read everything general. What they do not have is your measurements, your client outcomes, and the specific thing you learned doing the work last month. Summarised general knowledge is the one kind of content with genuinely zero value here, and it is what most business blogs consist of.
What we have observed, and what we cannot claim
This section is deliberately short, because the honest version of it is short.
On 4 September 2026 I checked fourteen live UK search results across the queries this studio cares about. Eight carried an AI Overview. Every "what is", "how much" and "…uk" query had one; the transactional local queries — "web design manchester", "seo agency manchester" — did not, and carried a local pack instead. On the cost and AI-SEO queries the AI Overview cited small UK studios rather than the large SEO tools, which is the single most encouraging finding for a business of this size.
What I cannot give you is a figure for how often Cybrial is cited by an assistant, because this site is three weeks old in its current form and any number would be noise. What I can give you is the method, which is run monthly: ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI mode the ten questions these guides answer, record whether Cybrial appears and what it is described as, and keep the transcripts.
What to actually do, in order
- Fix the foundations. Crawlable, fast, rendered, structured. If a page cannot be fetched and understood it cannot be cited, and everything below this line is wasted.
- Make your entity unambiguous. One business name, one description, one address, one founder, identical across the website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and every directory you appear in. Go and look at the old ones; there is usually a surprise.
- Rewrite your key pages to lead with the answer. Put the direct, quotable statement in the first hundred words rather than after the scene-setting.
- Attach a source and a date to every number you publish. In the sentence, not in a footnote.
- Publish the things only you know. Your measurements, your outcomes, the thing that went wrong and what it cost. This is the part that cannot be copied and it is the part most businesses never do.
- Add structured data that matches what the page says, and never any that does not.
- Measure it honestly, monthly, with a fixed set of questions and a saved transcript. Accept that this is a coarse instrument.
Six of those seven improve classic SEO as well. That is the argument for doing them regardless of how the AI search landscape settles: there is no version of the future in which clear, sourced, first-hand, technically sound pages turn out to have been a mistake.
